Acer joins Linaro IoT and Embedded Group

Linaro Ltd, the open source collaborative engineering organization developing software for the Arm® ecosystem, today announced that Acer, one of the world’s top ICT companies, has joined the Linaro IoT and Embedded (LITE) Group.

LITE focuses on delivering end to end open source reference software for more secure connected products, ranging from sensors and connected controllers to smart devices and gateways, for the industrial and consumer markets. Membership of LITE will give Acer a unique opportunity to work directly with other members of the global IoT ecosystem on shared engineering challenges. Acer, with its sound experience in hardware, software and cloud solutions is expected to help guide engineering decisions made by the group.

“We are very pleased to have Acer join Linaro as a part of the LITE effort,” said George Grey, Linaro CEO. “Acer brings extensive experience in building products for the consumer and business markets. We look forward to working with Acer, and we expect that their experience will influence our work on building open source platforms for IoT end-points, gateway and embedded applications.”

Industry interoperability of diverse, connected and secure IoT devices is a critical need to deliver on the promise of the IoT market. Today, product vendors are faced with a proliferation of choices for IoT device operating systems, security infrastructure, identification, communication, device management and cloud interfaces. Vendors in every part of the ecosystem are offering multiple choices and promoting competing standards. Linaro, Acer and the existing LITE members Arm, Canonical, Huawei, NXP, RDA, Red Hat, Spreadtrum, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and ZTE will work to reduce fragmentation in operating systems, middleware and cloud connectivity solutions, and will deliver open source device reference platforms to enable faster time to market, improved security and lower maintenance costs for connected products.

About Linaro

Linaro is leading collaboration on open source development in the Arm ecosystem. The company has over 300 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the Arm architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, Arm power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top five company contributors, worldwide, to Linux kernels since 3.10.

To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro’s work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. The full scope of Linaro engineering work is open to all online. To find out more, please visit and http://www.96Boards.org.